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Queer CUNY VIII

Queers et al.,

If anyone is in New York this weekend, the Queer CUNY VIII conference will be open to the public at 68th & Lexington (Hunter College) b/w 10am-6pm, seeking to end reductionist political discourse, asking queer students, theorists, activists, community members, leaders, and everyone to move beyond dichotomous identify/counteridentify subvert/assimilate debates (marriage/anti-marriage, for instance) towards a re-imagining of queer scholarship and activism unconstrained by unhelpful dichotomy, division, and binary warfare. I am excited to hear all the great work my fellow panelists will discuss. The brilliant, razor-sharp, and illustrious Lisa Duggan will be the keynote speaker delivering a captivating life-changing speech that I'm sure will change queer scholarship/activism as we know it today... hope to see you there!

11am- Session 1Panel A: Making Queer Media, Then and NowFor decades, queer media has spanned everything from riot grrrl record labels to campy 'zines. These mediums interact with mainstream media and capitalist business models in divergent ways, spawning different visions of the creative potential of avowedly queer media. This panel explores the range of possibilities and challenges that characterize queer publishing, music ventures, and independent youth media.

Panel B: Visual PleasureQueer art can create opportunities for experiencing aesthetic pleasure, (dis)articulating sexuality-based identities, and creating new visual cultures across national borders. The power of queer visual culture is not grounded so much in the identity of the artist as in these multiplicitous creative possibilities. This panel will explore art's queerly generative power by examining mediums as diverse as transnational feminist art, voguing performances, and gender-variant porn.

Panel A: Queering PedagogyThis panel explores the relationship between queerness and pedagogy,offering several interpretations of what it looks like to "queer" asan educator in a variety of classroom contexts. Panelists combinepersonal anecdotes and theoretical understandings of pedagogy toconceptualize ways for educators to incorporate queerness into theireveryday teaching lives.

Moderator: Loren Krywanczyk

Panelists:Jes Battis, Trans/Scripts: Collecting the Work of Queer Grads.Marty Fink, Queer Admin: Coming out Day and Other Pedagogical Surprises.Loren Krywanczyk, Queering Pedagogy as a First-Year Public School Teacher.Seth Clark Silberman, How To (And Why You Should) Teach Queer Theory.

Panel B: Real Live Freaks: Representing Deviance in Pop CulturePopular representations of sexual deviance have created a vast and titillating taxonomy of purported perversion and degeneration. Some of these pop phenomena are powered by moral panic: witness the proliferation of attention to the gay male meth addict or the straight white sex offender. Others emerge from a liberal logic of genteel tolerance and curiosity, as seen in talk-show television or best-selling memoirs. The presentations below engage critically with this voyeuristic spread, offering fresh perspective on just who is targeted as queer and how.

Moderator: Rosalind Petchesky, Hunter College

Panelists:Taylor Black, Hunter College, Perverted Justice: Shifting Landscapes of Control and the Contemporary War on Sex PredatorsKate Bovich, NYU, Devious Passing: An Experiment in How the Other Half LivesSassafras Lowrey, author of From GSA to Marriage: Stories of a Life Lived Queerly, Modern Freak Shows: Transgender Representations on Oprah 2003-2005.Benjamin Persky, CUNY Graduate Center, The Quintessential Gay Drug: HIV/AIDS, Crystal Methamphetamine, and the Instant Bottom.

Workshop: Queer Networking in New York CityThe aim of this workshop is to create a network of students, community organizers and people with similar interests, in order to effective build a strong, academic, queer community in New York City and the Tri-State area.

Panel A: Intelligibility and TransgressionQueerness signifies both an aberration from and resistance to the norms of sex and gender. Often, this task of recasting social norms is seen as incompatible with strategies that work more intimately with normative political structures or identities. This panel will aim to examine and problematize this facile opposition, with presentations examining bisexual invisibility, monster ethics, sovereignty and ‘necropolitics,’ and the politicization of gay male subjectivities.

Panel B: Local Strategies, Global ResistanceQueer political tactics might be said to focus on the formation of novel alliances and the undoing of colonizing political logic and practices. Nevertheless, queer politics walks the line between replicating and displacing these totalizing schemas. What does this edge look like in both local and transnational political organizing? This panel will explore and critique movement building and "queer community" from a variety of perspectives.

A practical and inspired discussion about queer kinship, headed up by folks from the Alternatives to Marriage Project (AtMP), a national nonprofit organization advocating for equality and fairness for unmarried people, including people who are single, who choose not to marry, cannot marry, or live together before marriage.

4:30pm-Keynote Address by Lisa DugganWest LobbyLisa Duggan, Professor, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director, American Studies Program at NYU, is the author of Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity and Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy. She is also co-author with Nan Hunter of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture.